Editorial for 26 April: It’s time for accountability

There must be more accountability when it comes to how public money is spent.

It is appalling, to say the least, that the Public Service Pensions funds cannot properly explain or justify thousands of dollars spent on bonuses, consulting and retainer fees, outside scope work – to the tune of $400 per hour – plus technical, administrative and out-of-pocket expenses related to the retirement fund for government employees.

Most of the expenses, including those for consultants to attend meetings outside the Toronto, Canada, region, could not be reconciled.

And it gets worse.

From July 2008 to December 2009 more than $27,000 was charged to a government charge card issued to the managing director of the fund. There’s nothing to prove exactly how the money was spent.

More than $34,000 was spent on consultancy services but again, there is no documentation to back up those charges to the government.

Auditors reviewing the Public Service Pension fund’s books must have come away from their exercise scratching their heads.

In a majority of instances reviewed they could not find any documentation to back up the validity of the charges paid by government to the fund’s administration and consultants.

The only reason these expenses and lack of documentation can be made public is because the Caymanian Compass filed a request under the Freedom of Information Law to get the audit report.

The first report given to us had much of the information redacted – or blacked out. We appealed to the Information Commissioner and finally got an unredacted copy of the report. That process took eight months.

Someone(s) should be held accountable for the money. We hope that people who read this front page article don’t adopt the attitude of “Oh well, that’s just how things work in Cayman”. It’s time for that thinking to be done away with.

2 COMMENTS

Jan Liebaers from the Information Commissioner’s Office passed on the following clarification on this editorial:

‘The time lines of this FOI request were as follows: the request was made on 30 August 2011, and an internal review was requested on 18 October. The appeal was made on 3 January 2012 and concluded on 24 April 2012 when you received the unredacted copies of the audit reports. This does make for a period of 8 months overall, but the appeal itself only took less than 4 months.

‘During this period, ICO was undergoing acute staff shortages, and is still coping with a record number of appeals currently being processed.

‘Under the FOI Law an applicant has the right to receive a full response in 30 calendar days, after which he has the right to ask for an internal review. The public authority then has 30 days to conduct the internal review, after which the issue can be appealed to the ICO. There are certain conditions that apply to these rules, but this is the general chronology of an FOI request.’